Anna was walking along a beach. To her right extended great expanses of marsh and flat land where the harvest was being gathered. She was walking clay dunes covered in wild flowers. To her left were great mudflats and beaches only covered at extreme high tide so the sea was up to a mile away. A distant line of blue.

Over her head was a vast bowl of blue sky with bright wispy clouds sweeping gently on their way.

Anna was neither a believer, not a doubter, nor in essence a questioner but she wondered at the very reality of the individual. To her, all humans, animals, nature were in a sense a unity, particularly humans, past, present, and to come. That mankind was observed with individuality but should embrace collectivity.

Than even the worst disasters of our existence can be taken as part of a whole.

In today’s reading from the book of Judges 11:29-39 there is a desperately sad passage where Jephthah promises God that if he is granted victory over the Ammonites he will sacrifice the first person who comes out of his tent on his return.

To his horror it is his only child, his daughter.

“O my daughter, what sorrow you are bringing me! Must it be you, the cause of my ill fortune! I have given a promise to the Lord and I cannot unsay what I have said.”

She accepts her fate and he carries out his promise.

Is Anna then father or daughter or are all of us in history father or daughter, once brother and keeper, happy and sad, dead or alive, here, there, now and in the past just are.